Chapter 8
COLE
Still smelling like a refugee from a Boy Scout Jamboree, I pace my office like a caged animal. It’s almost ten o’clock, hours since I served my time at the World Championship Barbecue Cooking Contest and drove home from the Dover airfield, collecting three speeding tickets along the way.
Every cell in my body screams for me to do something more than prowl from my desk to the wall of computer monitors. My fists want to destroy the speed bag in the fully outfitted gym at the far end of the second floor. Better yet, I could wake Kate and take her downstairs to the dungeon…
But neither bruised knuckles nor dominating my sub will change the message glaring from the central screen displayed on my office wall: What will your clients think when they see this?
I paid off this blackmailing motherfucker ten days ago: One hundred million dollars, transferred according to his demands.
I knew it was a mistake when I did it. Blackmailers are never satisfied with one payout. Once they’ve found the soft underbelly, they rip out another bite and another and another, until their victims bleed dry.
I should know. I watched the vicious animal who shoved Megan and me into this world destroy more marks than I can count.
Shannon considered extortion the logical extension of all the other cons she ran.
Game after game, she threatened to shame her targets in front of their families, their employers, and the public at large.
And now I have to accept that I’m as gullible as any rube Shannon ever bankrupted. Because when Kate was missing, I couldn’t make myself care about anything as mundane as money. I paid my blackmailer just so I could concentrate on bringing Kate home.
Now she’s back, and so is my leech of a blackmailer.
Sure, I’m a billionaire, but this asshole is greedy.
If I pay the next hundred mill, I might as well send a stack of blank checks.
My June 1 deadline will be followed by July.
Then August, September, all the way through to the end of the year. To the end of my life.
I’ve hired Best’s mercenaries to guard my home. How much more can it cost to have them take out an enemy like this? All I have to do is lure the fucker into the open…
After I figure out who he is.
The current threat—exposing the indictment that should be sealed within the juvenile justice system—could come from Megan.
She’s one of the few people alive who knows that billionaire Cole Wolf pled guilty to fraud in juvenile court more than a dozen years ago.
My sister has the same allergy to mercy that I do because she learned the same cons from the same woman. And God knows she could use the money.
But that’s the thing—Megan does need cash. She looked rough when she showed up with Tarasov. If she was my blackmailer, she never would have been at the gate. She would have fled with the first hundred million I paid. Megan would be safe and sound in Ibiza by now, or Dubai. Paris at the very least.
Plus, this whole blackmail game began with a threat to release my client list, before the indictment ever came into play. Megan has a lot of skills, but she isn’t a hacker. She could never break into my Lone Wolf files and get my clients’ names.
Kate could.
And when Kate first arrived here, with Fuck You tattooed on her chest, she might have. She might even have taken my money when she was on the run after our fight, lying to herself that it was payment for services rendered.
But she came back. She didn’t flee to Ireland forever. I’ve looked into her eyes, and I’ve been inside her body. I’d know if Kate was fleecing me.
I’m back to glaring at the monitor—What will your clients think when they see this?—when my phone rings. My first instinct is to let the call go to voicemail, but one quick glance at the screen tells me I can’t ignore this call.
“Barry,” I say.
“I have a deal that’s sure to earn me fifteen mill by the Fourth of July.”
Kate’s father never wastes time with greetings.
In the month since Kate and I were married, Lynch has come to me with half a dozen “sure things.” He’s the captain of Baltimore’s Irish mob, but he didn’t get his position from his shrewd business dealings.
He’s more a machine-gun-in-the-back-room, cement-shoes-in-the-harbor kind of guy.
It doesn’t bother me that my father-in-law is a criminal. A lot of my clients are. But Barry Lynch doesn’t listen to a word of my advice. He has the attention span of a gnat and a lemming’s sense of self-preservation. He refuses to learn.
“What deal?” I ask, fully aware that I’ve taken too long to respond. Lynch likes to boast. His trigger finger starts to itch when he has to throttle back his bragging.
“Illyria,” he says. “You know about it?”
“No.”
Lynch makes a disgusted sound with his lips. “You really don’t keep up with crypto, do you?”
I keep up with it enough to know it’s an excellent way for an idiot to lose a fortune.
And to know even the best ones are more volatile than Molotov cocktails.
Lynch’s new coin might make him fifteen million by Independence Day, but if he misses his window by an hour or two, he could find himself the same amount in the hole.
Lynch has yet to meet a cryptocurrency he doesn’t love.
Maybe it’s because mobsters like him use the stuff to launder money or maybe it’s the slick videos promising wealth the average man can only imagine.
But more than half of crypto coins fail before their second year, which Lynch never wants to hear.
“Who’s backing this one?” I ask.
“That’s what I want you to tell me.” Lynch’s tone prickles with indignation, as if my question is absurd.
“I can ask around.”
“Do that.” There’s noise in the background, a commotion I can’t make out.
Half the time, he calls from his family compound in the heart of Baltimore’s Canton neighborhood.
But the rest of the time, he’s “out in the community.” That can mean he’s at a bar.
Or a poker game. Or pumping away between the thighs of one of his mistresses.
He’s called me from all three in the past week, which makes me wonder how much Kate actually knows about her father’s failings.
“I’ll let you know what I find,” I say.
“By tomorrow,” he says. “Noon.” He disconnects the call before I can remind him that tomorrow is Saturday.
I can call in some markers, but I can’t guarantee I’ll have an answer by his deadline. It hardly matters. Lynch will buy this coin, the same way he’s bought half a dozen others.
He’s paying a small fortune to keep me on retainer. He insisted I marry Kate, too, to keep his business all in the family. I shouldn’t care that he ignores whatever I tell him.
Hell, I should look for more clients like him. Irish mob captains are a lot less likely than the average businessman to give a fuck about my criminal record. The years I spent in juvie might actually be a selling point for idiots like Lynch.
My phone rings again. Pyotr Tarasov. This time I let the call go to voicemail. I refuse to dance for the man who brought a gun into this house yesterday.
But he doesn’t leave a message. Instead, he calls back. A third time. A fourth.
The fifth time, I answer. “What?”
“I expect my men to answer promptly when I call.”
I’m not his fucking man. But I say, “What do you need, Tarasov?”
“I’m texting you a link. I need access to the company’s payroll records. Stat.”
Fucking bratva. I agreed to get Tarasov into the Canton Crew’s computers. I never signed on to be his tame hacker.
But I knew this test was coming. Not just the assignment, but the timing of it—well after hours on a Friday night. Tarasov’s reminding me he’s in charge, that Kate’s future depends on me.
I have the utmost confidence in the security on my end of this phone line, but I can’t speak for his. For all I know, he’s trying to entrap me into breaking the law. He might have bargained with law enforcement, saying he’d bring them Lone Wolf in exchange for going free.
“I’m afraid I can’t help you with another company’s computers.” I do my best to sound like a choir boy.
“The last man who told me that ran his tongue through his paper shredder.”
“Sounds like he was clumsy.”
“Or I had my Makarov jammed halfway up his zhopa.”
Apparently, Tarasov trusts his communications security as much as I trust mine. “Send me the link,” I say. “I’ll see what I can do.”
“By midnight,” he says, ending the call.
Once I get the name of the target—a mid-size Baltimore construction firm—I wonder if Tarasov actually owns the company, if that’s part of the test.
Or maybe Barry Lynch does.
I expect this to be a five-minute task. But my first three attempts bring me up hard against electronic defenses—further suggestion that the business is Tarasov’s. Or MaskedMarauder’s, as I came to know him in Winter Reckoning.
My fourth try, though, reveals an unexpected weakness in the system.
I poke at it. Pry it loose. And when I finally get access to the payroll records, I see that a full hour has passed.
Beating my midnight deadline by a full thirty minutes, I send Tarasov the credentials he needs to duplicate my work.
I log out, carefully erasing any tracks that can lead back to Lone Wolf.
I’m back to glaring at the blackmailer’s message when my phone rings yet again.
It’s another call I can’t send to voicemail—Hans Wagner, the head of Switzerland’s Banque Wagner Privée.
He’s one of my oldest clients, paying another massive retainer.
But it’s not just the money he pays me; his recommendations have earned me a full third of my client list.
“Hans,” I say, keeping my voice perfectly level. The fact that he’s calling early on a Saturday morning, Swiss time, does not bode well.
“We have a security breach,” he says.
I’m already logging in to his computer system as he explains the problem—a manager terminated for cause, somehow wreaking havoc within the bank’s complicated structure.
I ask a few questions. Explore a few nodes of the familiar computer architecture. The ex-manager is moving fast. If I weren’t already familiar with my client’s inner workings, I would be outmatched.
But I am familiar with the structure. And I’m ruthless as I fence in the now-former employee. It takes almost two hours, all of it spent with Hans murmuring in my ear, reminding me how many Euros are at risk if the bank’s business is exposed.
“You work miracles,” Wagner finally says.
“I try.”
He thanks me and terminates the call—which gives me the opportunity to discover three new messages, all from important clients, all of utmost urgency. Just another typical Friday night for a hacker king.
Swearing, I automatically do triage, diving into the New Jersey pharmaceutical manufacturer’s emergency first.
“Cole?”
My eyes are grainy when I look up from my screen. My office is dark, the shadows barely thinned by the glow from my computer. The small muscles along my spine spark from inactivity.
“Kate.” The single syllable sounds like a rusted sword scraping my throat.
“When did you get home?” she asks.
“A few hours ago.”
“You didn’t come upstairs.” She sounds hurt, like I forgot our anniversary.
“Too much work,” I say, gesturing at the monitors. “I didn’t want to bother you.”
“I—” She starts to say something but stops herself. Her face is in shadows. I can barely make out the curve of her chin, but the light from the hallway turns her hair to copper fire. After swallowing, she says, “There are armed men outside. They have a dog.”
I wasn’t expecting the Sawgrass guards to arrive before dawn. I tell her about hiring mercenaries.
“Is that really necessary?” she asks.
“I hope not,” I say evenly. The entire security team is probably overkill, but I’ll feel better knowing they’re here if Tarasov decides to deliver his next assignment in person.
She nods solemnly. “Come to bed,” she says.
A thick rope of lust twists through my belly. There will never be a night I don’t want to touch my wife. But I still have three client emergencies left to manage—and that assumes no one else calls with a crisis.
“I can’t,” I say. “I have a couple more projects to get through.”
She steps into the room, extinguishing the blazing corona of her hair. I catch the tilt of her head, her quick glance toward the iron bars that frame the dozen monitors on the wall.
I’m certain she’s remembering how I leashed her. I chained her to the frame because she broke a promise to me, because she cut her thigh after she vowed never to harm herself again.
But she kept that promise yesterday. She had me bring her downstairs instead.
Stepping away from the wall, away from the bad memory, she swallows hard. She crosses the room and comes to stand beside me. Without glancing at my computer, she says, “Let me help.”
“I can’t—”
“You know my code. You’ve seen what I can do. Let me help with your clients, and then you can come to bed.”
She says it without rancor, without the accusations she could have made: You spied on me in Winter Reckoning. You watched me for years without my knowing. You lied.
“They’re my clients,” I say, as if she’s missing the point.
“They’re Lone Wolf’s,” she says. “How many people do have on payroll? What’s one more?”
“I won’t pay you to work for me.” She’s my wife, not my employee. I take care of her, not the other way around.
“Then forget about paying.” She cups her hand to my cheek, where a day’s worth of beard grazes her palm. “Reimburse me in kind.”
Hunger flares inside me, a need more basic than food. My fingers close around her wrist, and her pulse quickens beneath my thumb. But I force myself to keep my tone light. “Not tonight, love.”
She flinches at the endearment, but she doesn’t pull away. “You’re right,” she says. “We work tonight. You can pay me back tomorrow… Or the next night. Or the one after that…”
“And,” I say.
A question flickers across her face.
My teeth find the fleshy base of her thumb, and I bite hard enough to make her shiver. “Tomorrow,” I say. “And the next night, and the one after that, I’ll take you to the dungeon. But tonight, I do my own work. Go to bed.”
She pouts, but she must recognize the finality in my tone. I watch her hips sway as she crosses the room. I clutch the edge of my desk when she reaches the door. But I don’t change my mind. I don’t call her back.
And I do my best not to think about the dungeon at all as I settle in for several more hours of lonely coding.